Several authors have proposed a social choice function based upon distance-consensus between different committee rankings. Under this framework, the total absolute disagreement between committees is minimised. The purpose of this paper is to formulate the underlying optimisation problem as a...

This article starts reviewing the satisficing philosophy of Goal Programming (GP) and interpreting their solutions from the point of view of the utility theory. This interpretation leads to a very general optimisation structure called Extended Lexicographic Goal Programming (ELGP). It is then...

Several situations of conflict between basic social principles can crop up during a consensus searching process. The majority principle and respect for minority groups is a possible example of a conflictive situation between two social principles. In this paper, we outline a specific consensus...

This paper has been devised with two different and at the same time complementary aims. First, to propose a methodology based upon goal programming that allows the aggregation of individual preferences provided by several social groups towards different criteria in a cardinal manner. The main...